Ghost Experiences

Somehow I got the itch to play Luigi's Mansion with all this talk about ghost's now

 

I've had two ghost experiences, or something unexplainable to be exact, in my life and I have a friend who recounted a very weird one which I believe.
The first one I had was at my aunt in Romford, Essex , in her house at night you sometimes hear the patter of small feet and laughter of children through the halls, she has no small kids. Given that I was about 8 at the time it scared the hell out of me. Apparently it is a normal thing for her and she really doesn't bother about it. The second experience happened when I was home one day alone in 1997, I was sitting in a room watching tv, and the door was open leading into a hall, but with curtains over the door. I became aware of booted footsteps coming down the hall with increasing pace. I literally froze there, as the steps passed by the curtains they blew in and the footsteps seems to fade into the distance. I never could figure out what that was about.
In the incident with my friend, he was driving down a highway at night in a hurry to get home and he saw a woman and her small child at the side of the road trying to hitch a ride. So he stopped to pick them up. The woman indicated that she was going to stop off before he got into town. So he continued driving with the radio on listening to music. As he got to the stop off point indicated by the woman he stopped and turned to tell her that it was her stop. But as it turns out his car backseat was empty. He was absolutely terrified when he told me the story or I would have wondered if he was drunk at the time.
One thing that does make you a believer in weird stuff like this is when you experience it first hand. I also think that all of it can be explained by science, it's just something that hasn't been discovered yet. A good example of this is the supposed Mummies Curse of King Tut in 1923.

 

LOL, I read the title of this thread in the new posts list, and opened it thinking I was gonna read about everyone's favorite partition copy tool.

I don't normally touch the subject of religion or personal belief in a technical forum, but since the question was asked and this is the 'Chit Chat' area, I guess it's ok in this case. OP mentioned he's an atheist, that's your right and I won't try to change your mind except for the fine print if you care to read it.
To paraphrase something I've heard... if you are right and I am wrong, no problem, my consciousness ceases and I will never realize I didn't go to heaven...but if I am right and you are wrong, you'll be in hell and know for the rest of time that you could have chosen differently. Do your homework and be confident what you believe in.

Have I had any paranormal experiences? Not exactly but I have had a couple of very intense dreams.

In my college years I became a believer in Jesus and developed a healthy respect for the Bible, in fact I kept a small Gideon's in my pocket and read it often. During the same time some of my friends were experimenting with a 'recreational substance' which is typically rolled up in a piece of paper then lit with a flame and inhaled. Of course being a college aged kid who hadn't yet gained the confidence to make my own decisions, I participated in quite a few of the experiments. In my dream, my friend was tearing pages out of the very Bible I carried in my pocket and using the Gospel of John to wrap our 'substance' for consumption, I distinctly remember seeing the red text "...must be born again..." as he lit it on fire. I woke in a cold sweat and have not touched the stuff since.

In the other dream, much more recent, I sat up in my bed in the middle of the night and it was pitch black yet I somehow knew a large number of demons were dancing around my bed and chanting some indecipherable language, it was obvious they were trying to drag me into hell. Though my rational brain 'knows' it was a dream, at the time it was so real (and still seems so if I think about it which I prefer not to) I could say I was actually somewhere else, no longer in my bedroom but still sitting up in my bed, with my wife lying there oblivious to it all, demons dancing all around. I called out for the Lord to help me and that's the last thing I remembered, of course I woke up normally the next morning.